The Mazak
VCN-530C 3-axis VMC
in use at Axminster
Tools & Machinery
Productivity boosted
An on-line and high street retailer of
tools and machinery that it imports
from global suppliers, Axminster
Tools & Machinery, does, however, choose
to manufacture some machine accessories,
notably jigs and chucks, including the
popular Clubman SK80 woodturning chuck,
in house to ensure consistently high quality.
Typical past practice has been to employ
standard wind-up vices to xture
components for machining on CNC mills and
Axminster Tools & Machinery is using US-manufactured Chick System
5 workholding equipment (1st Machine Tool Accessories, www.is.gd/
nojopo) to help increase productivity and effi ciency in the machine
shop of the Axminster, Devon-based operation
machining centres, but as production levels
rose this approach became too inef cient.
Several years ago a new, still on-going job
came along that required particularly
accurate clamping of multiple small parts,
namely steel jaws for chucks.
Conventional vices were not suitable, as
it was impossible to present a suf ciently
large number of parts to the spindle. An
initial workholding solution was to use a
steel xture plate machined to retain the
parts by bolting them individually into
position. The problem with that was the two
hours it took to change over to produce the
next batch.
To provide a solution, 1st MTA proposed
its Chick Qwik-Lok system. This signi cantly
reduced set-up times, as the jaws secure
components quickly and to high repeatability
for milling and drilling. One large part can be
clamped between two jaws, but to allow
more parts to be loaded at a time, more
usually a pair of components, or multiples,
are held in two stations. Aluminium jaws
machined with the pro le of the parts to be
held ensure they are retained rmly during
machining.
Turning a single handle advances the two
movable Qwik-Lok jaws simultaneously
towards a xed central jaw to clamp the
parts, which also has the effect of cancelling
the opposing forces and creating a reliable
reference point for machining. A bene cial
side-effect of clamping more parts faster
was a rise in walk-away time, allowing
operators to be more productive in other
parts of the factory.
Once Axminster Tools & Machinery
adopted this approach, clamping several
steel mounting jaws in each Qwik-Lok
station, productivity was dramatically
increased. The machine operator is able to
change over up to six Qwik-Loks on a vertical
machining centre (VMC) table in half an
hour, four-times faster than when previously
using the bespoke steel xture plate.
Moreover, the latter had the drawback of
potentially causing damage to the cutter in
the event of a programming error, whereas
this is not the case with aluminium jaws.
The machinable soft jaws were soon
found to be a versatile solution to other
The two-part Chick foundation plate fi tted
to the Mazak VCN-530C at Axminster Tools
& Machinery contains an array of holes
11 deep by 27 across. Here, a grooving
jig for a router is being produced in three
operations by clamping the aluminium
component in three Chick Qwik-Loks
26 July/August 2020 | www.machinery.co.uk | MachineryMagazine | @MachineryTweets
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